george w. bush, and barack obama. we will feature lincoln's gettysburg address givens or -- given in pennsylvania. the speech is reenacted by an actor. >> a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. announcer: watch our 10 part series saturdays at 9:30 a.m. and p.m. eastern on american history tv, on c-span2. announcer: next on book tv's author interview program "after words," maya kornberg looks at the functions of congressional committees and examines strengths and weaknesses. she's interviewed by senior fellow kevin gosar. "after words" is a weekly after

view -- weekly interview program about authors' latest work. kevin: welcome to "after words." maya: thank you. thanks for having me. excited to be here. kevin: i quite enjoyed your book, "inside congressional committees." we are going to talk about it. but first let us talk about you. on the path that led you to writing this book. you trained as a political scientist. when in your life did you first take an interest in politics, affairs, governance issues, and when did you decide, i think i want to do this for a career or a profession? maya: so, i've always been interested in democratic institutions and how we can make them work better for the people they are meant to serve. i believe that anytime you have a group of people together making decisions about how to govern themselves and allocate

resources, you have politics. and democratic institutions are really at the center of a healthy political system. and they are central to how groups of people live and how they organize, and that is why i think i did -- that is why i think it is so central as a topic and i decided to studying it. i think legislatures in particular are really central to the way in which societies come together and govern themselves. the other thing that's been really central to my beliefs in my career path is the conviction that you need to be understanding something deeply, in order to improve it. and so, that is why i have really been committed throughout my work and remain committed to marrying scholarship and understanding of the way in which institutions work to

concrete policy and advocacy to improve our institutions. and i hope to continue to work on these themes. kevin: all right. well, when you were studying to be a political scientist, the graduate school process, i've been there, it's a long slog. as a form of trade training. when you were doing that, were there any particular professors or books that were particularly important in your own development as a scholar? maya: so, that's a great question, because i've been influenced by many, many political scientists, as well as scholars and adjacent -- in adjacent fields. have to start by saying of course as a congressional scholar, the iconic works of richard feno, who really in so many ways shaped the field,

shaped the way that i view studying congress, not just because of the substance of both his arguments, but also his approach. i'm a big fan of what he called the soak and poke approach, he really immersed himself in congress in order to understand. -- to understand it. i believe that remains a really important way to approach the study of congress but really any democratic institutions. and then i would also have to say more recent scholarship by folks like francis lee and sarah bender and others has shaped the way in which i view institutions. i think that there were early -- their work really encourages us to take a systematic approach to institutions and understand they are malleable, and that congress and others who study congress

has changed and it's shaped by many dynamics and many people who have walked its halls. then of course my phd supervisor, mr. king, who is a scholar of racial politics among other things, i think really inspired me, in terms of the approach to take to research, inspired me to question existing approaches in the field, and to be critically minded and really form independent approaches and thought processes towards things. those are just a few, of course. i am influenced by so many others. and i would also say that -- and

this is ingrained into my book as well as some of my other work -- political philosophers, particularly for the political philosophers and other fields -- in other fields, have shaped the way i approach my work even though i am not a political theorist. it is very close to my heart and the way that i approach things. folks like of course -- iconic full officers like -- iconic philosophers like irish young. their scholarship has really inspired my approach to studying congress but also so many other things in the field. kevin: yes, i can fully appreciate the value of political theory and trying to understand the phenomenon as complex as congress. to say nothing of the broader sphere of politics. political theory is very much a

look at ideas, conception, ways of thinking about things. each actor who is out there in the political world has their own ideas and their own concepts of what they are supposed to be doing and what they are up to. let's turn to the book. "inside congressional committees." they function in the legislative process, published by columbia university press. writing books, as you no doubt experienced, is not easy. to complete this book, you did a ton of work, as evidenced by the analyses in there, the works cited, the bibliography, the notes, etc., etc. how long did it take you to complete this book? and what motivated you to pull through and get it over the finish line? maya: as you said, it's a very laborious process. and so, i think that it has to be a labor of love.

as cheesy as that might sound. [laughter] i think that you have to genuinely enjoy the process itself. and i genuinely enjoyed learning about congress and the way it works. i was also really inspired by the people that i interviewed. who are in congress, getting a chance to interview staffers and members and other folks involved in the process. it really inspired me and i enjoyed just learning from them about what they do. but it's not all romantic. i also think that the process requires, as you said, a lot of conviction and a lot of hard work. i had the pandemic lockdown to take away perhaps other distractions and give me some time to to write a lot of it. but of course, it also takes a

lot of writing and rewriting, and a lot of encouragement and support from others, which i was lucky to have, from mentors and fellow scholars, friends who were really instrumental, and not just encouraging me to continue, but also in giving early feedback and in greatly strengthening the book as it took shape. kevin: was this a book that grew out of your thesis or dissertation that you produced to that your doctorate? maya: it was. -- to get your doctorate? maya: it was. it was a direct outgrowth of my phd. but that being said, i perhaps didn't realize how much more work this would be when i embarked on it -- it really took

on a shape and a life of its own. i collected a lot of new data and told i think a much more nuanced story with that new data and new thinking and new writing than i was able to do in a phd. but the phd work formed a very solid and poor basis for the book, and then the book grew out of that. kevin: the dissertation and the book differed on the dissertation has a larger audience. i hope this book has a larger audience. there's a lot in it. you mentioned this earlier, but i want to dig deeply about the methods used to do this book. some political scientists love to crunch numbers.

their books are just really thick with math. you put some of that in there, but have a lot of other methods mixed in there, perhaps inspired by giants in political science. what made you take this approach? did you outset -- from the outset, did you decide you were going to use multiple ways of looking at things? how did that come to be? maya: as you said, i was definitely inspired by existing work on congress and the way in which work by others has eliminated different parts of this process. i am a fan of the richness of multimethod approaches, because i think in handling something as complex as say the legislative process in congress,

but of course many other questions that political scientists try to answer are equally complex, there are many different layers. and one approach might be good at getting out the truth from one of those layers but maybe not another one. so melting together different approaches that might be better suited to different parts of the process is really important. for example, in the book as you say, i use different approaches to get at different questions and some question -- sub questions. one of the things i look at is how committee hearings are put together today. what is the process? the nitty-gritty of setting up the hearing -- a hearing? counting votes, counting words is not going to be the way to answer that question. detailed and extensive interviews with staffers in

various positions and members of various positions who are involved in that process is really going to be the best way to answer that question. on the other hand, i looked at the actual words that are used by witnesses who testified before committees. i wanted to get a broad sense of that. so i used kind of a large data set of thousands of transcripts and counted incidents of certain words, and that gives you kind of a broader way of looking at something that is not just speaking to people and looking at things in a qualitative way. and so, that allowed me to get to another part of the question. there are other methods that i use. together, it can help tell a more comprehensive story about what's going on. kevin: all right. let's dig into what is going on.

let's take into committees. since they are the subject of the book. congress has had committees basically sense 1789 -- since 1789, when congress was a much smaller operation. committees have always been with congress. the house in the senate have always had them. why? maya: so, as you mentioned, committees have really been essential institutions in congress since its inception. the way i like to think about it is, committees exist because congress is a huge institution. it has to deal with a huge number of issues, as we all know, from watching it. so it needs to delegate responsibility and ownership in some way, and it does this through committees. committees delegate responsibility to look more deeply and take ownership of different issues. committees are where members can specialize in a topic and take ownership of it and deliberate

and understand policies more deeply. committees are also a way of decentralizing power within the chamber, and allowing more legislators to be involved in different ways in the process. just like many other big organizations that we might think of. and in terms of how committees actually function in the process, congress, in what many of us know as regular order situations, a bill is introduced in the chamber, then referred to the committees, than the committees to the actual work of -- then the committees do the actual work of having hearing s with witnesses and amending the bill and then they will send it back to the floor for a final vote. but traditionally, committees are where a lot of that in-depth policy formulation work is designed, at least to happen in congress. kevin: yeah, i suppose basically

what you're saying is it is a bit like any other organization. you can't have everybody working on the same task at the same time. especially if you are about dozens of people or as in the house these days, 435 members and 100 and the senate. so you kind of engage in a division of labor. and that allows the organization to not only develop specialization as you said, but also to work on multiple things at the same time and that just getting good on one topic -- not just get incurred on one topic. -- anchored on one topic. where do these committees come from? how are they created? maya: committees have changed over the course of congress' history. the committees that we have today are written into the official rule of the house and the senate. and the committees and the jurisdictions have not changed since the 1970's, the last time there was a structural reform in

the way that standing committees are defined in their jurisdiction. that being said, there are many what we call select committees that might pop up at certain times that congress needs to deal with a specific issue of that they, an investigation or a pressing issue, so it will create what is called a select committee, which is more ad hoc and less permanent than what we know of as the standing committees. one example of a select committee, everyone is very aware of it, the january 6 committee, but of course there are many others that congress can create through a resolution and can help it dig into issues of the day. kevin: right. the committees themselves often spawn subcommittees. they do that on their own authority typically. is that correct? maya: yes.

subcommittees is a much less recommended process. much more variable. between committees and overtime, as you said, they can kind of spawn from the committees themselves, and also -- we will talk about this later in terms of how committees actually function -- there's a lot of variation in the way in which the subcommittee and the full committee interact with each other, in terms of how they decide things and how they work, how they hold hearings. they want more variation in that versus the regimented approach that i just mentioned with standing committees. kevin: you noted there are a bratty of types of committees, the appropriations committees, who make decisions about spending, the select committees like the january 6 focused on. also joined committees where the house and senate have

legislators sitting together and making decisions together. your book focuses on authorizing committees. why? could you explain to viewers what do the authorizing committees do? maya: so, that's a great question. authorizing committees to what it sounds like they do, they authorize legislation related to agencies. so they can decide where and what money can be spent. but appropriations bills are what decide what's going to be spent. as you said, that changes the nature then of the kinds of hearings and kinds of work that appropriations committees will do versus authorizing committees. and so, in wanting to understand the kind of substantive and policy formulation discussions happening in congress that is why i focused on authorizing

committees, as the focus of this book and understanding kind of where legislation is authorized, how these policy debates happen, and who congress listens to and how they listen to them, in having these policy formulation debates. kevin: if i could follow up on that, you were looking at the authorizing committees, these are the committees that are writing law. they are the ones deciding policy. you listed a bunch of them. but for viewers' sake who have not yet the book, which committees did you look at in each chamber? can you name a few of those? maya: yeah. i looked at a few different committees in each chamber. committees that varied in terms of their policy, expertise, and jurisdiction, and in terms of the relative degree of partisanship of the committee and that is something that i can

touch a little bit more on, but committees vary in how partisan they are based on the history and their culture and topic. and varied in terms of the desirability of the committee, so some are what are called a list committees, some committees that everyone wants to be on and will engage in differently than committees that are less desirable. i looked at the house ways and means committee, and that is an a list committee. i looked at the house science committee, which is perhaps a less desirable committee, but one that has a very specific subject matter expertise that i wanted to dig into. in the senate, i looked at committees like the senate foreign relations committee, which is known as a more bipartisan committee, but also the senate commerce committee and senate judiciary committee, really a few different ones in

each chamber which allowed for an exploration of different kinds of hearings, also different kinds of topic areas, relative levels of partisanship, relative levels of desirability. i just named if you. but there are other committees i look at in the book. to get a sense of this book and the breath of different conversations that can happen. kevin: you referenced a-list committees. there are some committees considered better than others. what makes one committee more desirable to be on than some other committees? narrow making laws, rate -- they are all making laws, right? maya: a number of issues can affect what committee members are wanting to be on. but i would say one of the key factors as the relative power of those committees to be involved in the process. so, committees like the house

natural resources committee or the house ways and means committee have much broader jurisdictions in making decisions over bills i got -- bills that get passed versus other committees that deal with no doubt a very crucial issue, but less crucial in terms of actually deciding a lot of where the money gets spent, and kind of the key pressing policy issues of the day. and i would also say that the overall culture of committees, the ways in which different members have been involved historically, and the way in which these committees have kind of crept up and taken over issues, for example a new member coming in and wanting to be on one committee versus another. kevin: right, right, some issue areas have broader breath of power.

my understanding also is some committees by virtue of their subject area are more useful, more empowering to a legislator who wants to fund raise for reelection. so if you are overseeing the banking industry, the banking industry is a very lucrative industry. maya: that's an excellent point. which is also really important to raise. as we all know, money is deeply embedded into the political process, and committees are definitely included in that. being on a certain committee can help fund raise and also -- there's been some research on this by me but by other scholars -- also the way in which you have fun race for the party in the past can help you get on a certain committee when you are trying to make the case to party leadership for example that you need to be in a committee. so it's deeply embedded in the process. kevin: all right. i wanted to ask, one of the

things you note in your book is the power of committees, within their respective chambers, has risen and fallen. that is to be expected. as you noted earlier, institutions change. but why or how does a committee's power grow or diminish? what do you mean by power in this context? maya: that is a really excellent question, and of course courts of the study of committees as institutions within the legislature. the way that i like to think of power is, first and foremost, is autonomy. do committees have the power to be deciding their own agendas and the committee leaders deciding those agendas and the members versus the party and the party speaker and party

leadership deciding that agenda for them? what we have seen over the past several decades is that committees have increasingly less autonomy as a result of a number of different reforms that have happened over the last several decades. power has become much more concentrated in the speaker and also in lobbyists and other stakeholders, but within the chamber, within the speaker and the party leadership, less so in committees. we see this also in the way in which committees have been involved in the process. earlier on, i spoke about regular order. that is traditionally the way in which congress is meant to legislate. a bill is introduced and referred to the committees. but increasingly, we see committees circumvented by the speaker bills or pushed through with very limited time for committees to hold hearings and dig into an issue before the bills are pushed through to a vote, which really strips them

of their legislative power. and i might also highlight in terms of their autonomy that they used to have a lot more staff that allowed them to really form the kind of expertise that is necessary, in order for the members of that committee to specialize and learn and understand the different angles of an issue in the way that i explained earlier committees are meant to help them do. so congress has several 1000 fewer staffers now than it did if decades ago, and also relies on a smaller subset of support agencies. one congress and its committees do not have that power, it also makes it easier for the speaker and the party leaders and lobbyists to be controlling the process and leave less space for committees and members to be

really pushing and deepening the policymaking conversation. kevin: that is true. that's one of the startling fines when i started studying congressional capacity. the number of staff in each chamber is down significantly between the house since the 1980's. you have this legislative branch support agencies, the government of countability office, congressional research service, cdo, the no longer existing office of technology assessment, the cohorts of almost all those agencies have also gone down. though of course the size of government and complexity of government has grown. with a delta forming between the number of people who can study up and be experts and understand government and perhaps direct it going down the size of government going up. that brings us to a central thing that committees do. which is conduct hearings.

what are the purposes for hearings? maya: so, there's many different purposes of the hearing. the chair of the committee is the person who gets to set the agenda, in terms of what hearings really happen. there's a number of reasons why a chair might want to hold a hearing. perhaps they want to just as a committee gain insight and start gathering information about an emerging policy issue. perhaps they want to build out public support for an issue and this is a multi-ethical side of hearings, that these are public forums, they are frequently watched by many people, and so, it is a way to mobilize public support for an issue or opposition to an issue. by the same token, it is also a way to mobilize the chamber and

invisibility for that issue. oversight hearings are meant as a check on the executive branch. and there are also hearings that are meant to allow stakeholders in a specific policy area to come in and really make their vi ews on an issue known and eliminate the different vantage points of an issue in general. the chair is usually important in setting the tone for which kinds of hearings have been. and so, for that reason, the chair might have specific issues and his or her own -- in his or her own districts and other interests that might also decide what hearings that committee is going to hold. one of the staffers who i interviewed in the book i think

framed nicely, he said that hearings can be proactive or reactive. so hearings can be meant to be getting ahead of an issue, and understanding as i mentioned at the outset kind of gaining some initial insight or understanding of an issue, or they can be reactive, they can be reacting to something on the ground and wanting to engage with it in a certain way, either to gain publicity for it or to make a statement known, or to react to it in a certain way. for example, say the american embassy in a specific country has been attacked, they might want to have a hearing to understand and react to that issue. on the other hand, the story that i tell in the book is about the science committee's genetic engineering hearing in 2015, they wanted to understand a little bit what the technology means and gain initial insight. there was that some -- there is

that simple rural part of hearings, they can be reacting to an issue or almost preempting an issue and trying to understand how it might develop. kevin: one thing that anyone that reads your book is going to come away with and appreciate is the extent to which participating in the committee process is a vehicle for learning for legislators. i think we tend to forget the fact that representative democracy is an exercise in amateurism. you don't have to be a policy wrong -- you're going to be a assigned issues that are outside of your will house and expected to become expert in them. one of the legislators quoted said being in congress was a bit like going back to college,

because there was so much learning involved. another anecdote that was in your book with one of the interviews you did with somebody in congress showed a member who was involved in a hearing about a veteran's family and how they were reliant on the snap program. i wonder if you could share that. maya: this was a hearing in the agriculture committee, one of the committees that i looked at in the house. and it really brought in different folks to talk about the many different issues that are involved in snap. the supplemental nutrition assistance program of the government, known as food stamps. and one of the legislators that i spoke to recounted

specifically a hearing that talked about veterans who rely on food assistance. and the story of a specific veteran who had given so much to the country, relying on food stamps, early, i think for him -- really, i think for him, underscoring the importance of that program. and the program of the 2018 farm bill, the farm bill's proceeding it, -- bills proceeding it. had a voting of what that bill would look like, the story of that veteran and the way that hearing illuminated part of the issue for him really made him think about food assistance in a different way. this was a legislator who had not been supportive of the program before. and so, really humanizing

and also adding another perspective to the issue for him that he had not perhaps -- not even not seen, but also not appreciated and taken in in that way, allowed them to shape and reshape how he viewed the farm bill and how he viewed the food assistance program in general. kevin: yeah. i think it was also a remarkable example of how the voice of an average american can be heard in washington, d.c. the place to do it very often as committees. this brings us to the issue of who gets to be a witness. certainly, your book shows that very often, witnesses at hearings are experts. but they are not the only types of folks who get to come in.

who else gets to come in and testify? maya: so, in the book, i talk about different types of witnesses that might come to testify. first of all, there is also different kinds of experts. there's what i call in the book a labeled expert. someone that by virtue of their partisan affiliation and previous statements on an issue, everyone really knows what they are going to say on this. perhaps it is a prominent skeptic of climate change who has come to testify many times and is associated with the republican party, and they are coming in yet again to say the same thing that they've said before in climate change. there's also something that i call an unlabeled expert. someone coming in who has not been associated publicly with an issue.

they have not been running a blog, talking about an issue. they have not been a former member of an administration. and so, there is some freshness and openness to hearing them that you don't see with labeled experts. as you said, there is not just experts coming to testify. hearings are really a platform also to hear a spectrum of voices, of average americans who can come in and share how an issue might affect them, based on their lived experience. and of course, expertise in an issue does not just mean technical expertise, but it also means lived experience and understanding of an issue that affects you. there's folks who i call in the book personal storytellers, who are sharing from their personal experience. we were talking about food stamps.

so the wnba star who grew up with food stamps coming to share her story and experience of that issue, or a journalist who lived and reported alongside isis, coming to share his personal story of the conflict in the region. so, those witnesses are also an important part of the process. and interestingly, i ended every interview by asking members, can you tell me a story of a witness who stuck with you? any story, in your years in congress? almost every single one told a story of what i would call the person a storyteller -- told a story of what i would call a personal storyteller. that is what really sticks with members. and i think that really underlines the importance of those kinds of witnesses. of course there are also a fourth type of witness which i call in the book a sports person for an issue -- a spokesperson

for an issue. we can think about them as, the food stamps hearing is just fresh in my mind because we been talking about it, in that hearing and in the course of the conversation about the farm bill, you had folks coming to testify who were advocates or worked in hunger relief agencies and programs to come and speak about their vantage point and about the communities and the vantage point of the issue that they represent in their everyday work and the advocate for as a spokesperson for that cause. so there is really a richness of different kinds of witnesses that can come to testify and as i've been explaining, each bring a different layer to an issue, and of course in making complex

policy decisions, all those different layers and vantage points are really important to really deliberating about a specific policy. kevin: all right. hearings don't occur naturally. they don't throw themselves. they rely heavily upon congressional staff. can you talk a little bit about what staff do to make hearings happen? maya: so, staff are really highlighted in the book and showcased as the backbone of the process. staff do, i would say, it is not overstating it to say that they do almost everything. the staff might have some power as to what hearings to hold. the staff will really decide what witnesses come to testify,

in consultation with the chair and the ranking member, they will decide how to brief members of the committee before, and they will decide how they are interacting is a majority on a minority staff -- as a majority on a minority staff. another thing that i talk about is how the committee as a whole approach is a certain issue. it is the staff network and expertise that decides which witnesses come to testify and it is the staff relationships that decide how they are interacting with the minority and the minority staff -- majority and minority staff in making those decisions. lastly i would highlight that my book talks about how lobbyists are involved in the process. it is a staff expertise that also is instrumental in either

forming the soft underbelly that exposes the process to infiltration by lobbyists, or in bolstering the committee process. so staff who are kind of more expert on an issue might be less easily manipulated by lobbyists who are trying to come in and suggest witnesses and give information ahead of the hearing, and all the things that of course makes sense for lobbyists to do. so staff, their relationship, identity, and networks are really critical to deciding really everything about how a hearing ends up happening and how the members are going to be informed ahead of that hearing and who is going to speak at that hearing. kevin: that gets at a theme that is kind of rip current throughout the book. -- recurrent throughout the book. it goes back to the saying that knowledge is power. and if you have members who are

brand-new to the chamber, lots of rapid turnover, thanks to elections, and if you have staff who are brand-new to their jobs, in terms of being able to understand policy, to understand what the executive branch is up to, or what a pharmaceutical industry or some other aspect of society is doing, whether it is good, bad, worth looking into, they are not well prepared to do that. and so, having expertise embedded in legislative branches is an important thing, because as you highlight, some of the smartest people in this town are not lobbyists. these are professionals who know an awful lot. and their job is to have knowledge and exerted as power. -- exert it as power. committee staffs and relationships, who chairs the committee, who was the minority

leader of the committee, as i read your book, it really emphasized to me that ultimately this is a bunch of people getting together and having to figure out how much they want to collaborate and how much they want to coordinate. what should we focus on? well, that is up for grabs. what should we work on first? that is indeterminate, too. that has to be hashed out. and different people are going to have smaller and larger voices in the process of deciding that. and if people don't feel like they have been consulted -- when you looked at committees, did you see collaboration happening a lot? you see coordination that was doing good things? maya: yes, so as you're saying, there's a huge amount of variation in how and how much

collaboration is happening. so, on the staff level, there's official rules that might entitle the minority to one witness any hearing -- in a hearing. that entitle the minority party to a significant amount of notice before the hearing. but frequently when there's good relationships, and long-standing relationships between the minority and majority staff, which might switch, as parties l ose can retake control of the chamber, the same staffers might be in the majority once and then the minority, so they have good relationships, then they might give them more notice and more say in who was coming to testify in the hearing. in some cases, when there good relationships and particularly on less fraught topics, there might even be a collaborative committee approach to deciding the whole panel of witnesses together. versus having a next amount of majority witnesses and then when

minority witness. that's on the staff level. another thing that i talk about in the book is the relationship between the chair and the ranking member, really, in setting the tone and the culture of a committee. and so, on committees that have a kind of historically and institutionally kind of embedded bipartisan culture, there might also be a more communal approach to issues that are charted by the chair and the ranking member together and their respective staffs, and more of an emphasis on hearings that really are a kind of collaborative approach to an issue, and as i talk about in the book, are more likely to result in witness panels that have a balance of different perspectives. and really set the tone for a more kind of deliberative learning process.

the other thing that i talk about in the book, in terms of the capacity for committees to encourage collaboration, is that they are really one of the only bipartisan institutions in congress where members from both parties have to come together on a regular basis and sit in hearings, engage in committee work, and learn about different things. and so, joint membership in a committee and the experiences and shared goals that come from that are important in fostering some of the relationships that are lacking in congress, especially since many members do not live in congress anymore, which they once used to, and especially given what of course we all know is a hyper-partisan and truly rancorous environment. so, in the context of that, committees can under some conditions form a space to build relationships. one of the stories that i tell

in the book about this is the friendship between senator doug lugar, who i interviewed before he passed away in 2019, and then senator barack obama. and senator lugar really underscored that it was their joint membership in the senate foreign relations committee, which senator lugar chaired and barack obama was then a member of, and their participation in what's called codels, or congressional delegation trips, that committees take frequently to understand an issue and to gain information. they might go abroad, as is the case in the senate foreign relations committee, and really form some of these experiences that are central to building some of the basic relationships that we see are so lacking in congress today. kevin: all right. one thing that was interesting in the book was that committees

can behave a little bit differently, depending on the issue. some issues are highly polarized, highly charged, and they have value for legislators were trying to seek reelection. those other types of hearings that often devolve into redshirt versus blue shirt shouting competitions, where members are up on the dais trying to have their say. but we'd be mistaken if we thought those were all types of hearings, because some measures are not polarized and render themselves easily to bipartisan conversations. speaking of these bipartisan conversations, your book shows that members don't always get together in formal committee hearings. they sometimes have these informal gatherings. these are the ones we don't see on television, typically. we don't get much reporting on them because often media are

not allowed to be in there. opinion tell us about those in their value -- and their value? maya: we are all too familiar with the kinds of hearings that we see on tv, with the theatricality that is involved, and the partisan politics that might encourage. but there are also hearings where less cameras are present and committees come together in different settings, and when cameras are not present of course, that takes away the kind of sight for soundbites that you are mentioning and kind of public displays that of course we all know from television. since we've been talking about the agriculture

committee and the farm bill, because it's fresh in my mind, i tell the story in the book of the farm bill listening tour, which was a really unique thing that the agriculture committee did ahead of the farm bill passing. they want across the country and they held what i think can be described as open mic sessions almost, where farmers and everyday americans got to come up and take the mic and tell their story. so that was a very, very different setting for a number of reasons, from the traditional hearings that we just described. first of all, it was a different kind of interaction with the witnesses. you don't have witnesses who are coming in and speaking off of a script largely reflective of the written testimony they will have sent before. and really constricted to kind of five minutes of speaking. and members who are then sitting in assigned seats, and cameras at the ready.

you have much more of an open give-and-take with businesses and really the opportunity for a conversation with everyday americans. the other thing that you have is an opportunity for members to interact with each other in a different way. the farm bill listening tour took them out of washington, as hearings like that often do, and took them out of the setting and the drama of the hearing rooms and allowed for a different, more collegiate type of interaction. and other briefings that have been in congress that i talk about in the book, where the cameras are not there, you are not in this scripted setting, also allow for a much more open and give-and-take between the members themselves that the traditional hearings, which we think of, do not always make

space for. kevin: right. i recall the book recounting that, frequently committees will just get together and they will order in food and staff and members will sit together and just chew the fat over various topics without being quoted -- -- without having to worry about being quoted by a member of the media or sending foolish of -- or sounding foolish if they asked a question. and the time we have left -- in the time we have left, i want to ask you, the subtitle of your book, function and dysfunction in the legislative process. let's talk about dysfunction a little bit. -- this function a little bit. what do you mean by function and dysfunction? maya: there are ways in which the legislative scholarship internationally tells us that committees are meant to act,

purposes that they are meant to fulfill in legislatures, because committees are a ubiquitous institution that exist in many legislatures around the world. committees that are functioning are committees that are fulfilling this purposes. -- these purposes. one of the things that committees are meant to do is to be a space to learn and engage with research on an issue and engage with all of the information that you would need to gather in order to understand the policy area. committees are also traditionally meant as a deliberative space. a space to reason through and understand the different angles of an issue and to really to be and discuss and deliberate the different parts of a policymaking process. and committees are also kind of beyond this space that they have

been being a core legislative institution that is meant to to help we can understand an issue and right laws. also, of course, meant to oversee the executive in many parliaments and have oversight hearings and help kind of reign in the power of the executive, so they have this legislative purpose of understanding policy issues and of helping move forward and right bills -- write bills, and then they also have an oversight purpose, where they are an instrument of the legislature to be holding hearings and engaging in other work that will help it oversee the executive hand-check executive power -- and check

executive power. kevin: everyone will come away with the impression that there are good things happening within committees. it is not just partisan theater. but there is learning and policymaking, there is oversight. what can committees do that are? -- do better? maya: right, as you mentioned, there is definitely, when you unpacked the process and look under the legislative hood, as it were, some of the mechanics are still working. but of course there's a lot, as we know all too well, that still needs to be improved. so, one of the things that i talk about in the book and that we've mentioned throughout this conversation is really the centrality of the staff. committees do not have enough staff and congress does not have the staff that it needs to do its job. it is not just fewer staff than

it had, it also had fewer staff relative to the executive. that it is trying to rein in and it needs to have its own independent sources of information and ability to stand up against in a strong democratic system. so it really needs staff. it also needs staff with the necessary expertise, will have the training to understand things. and it needs staff that are represented of the country. we have a congress that relies on overwhelmingly white, affluent backgrounds due to the pipeline of unpaid internships, so really investing in staff that are necessary is really important and i highlight that in the book. the other thing that committees need to be doing is to be rethinking the way in which hearings happen. i talked about a little bit the difference between the

traditional hearing formats and hearings outside of washington. increasingly, we have members who are not in washington most of the week. they or maybe 20 thursday and they are barely in the hearings. covid-19 encouraged digital hearing formats. as i mentioned, allowed for a different kind of engagement between members and a different kind of engagement with witnesses who might not be able to travel to washington.

so committees, as i mentioned, have the potential encourage bipartisanship under certain conditions and committee leaders can lean into this and create spaces like congressional delegation, but also more bipartisan working spaces for staff and bipartisan engagement >> that lately there has been a lot of discussion from other members of staff. it is still so lacking. and it is still so debilitating. in the context of the contemporary congress. there is still a lot of work to do, and a few of the reforms that i talked about in the book that can help strengthen the

congress as a whole. host: dr., thank you for sharing with me and the audience about your new book, inside congressional communities function and dysfunction in the congressional process. guest: thank you for having me on the show. >> after one of our signature book tv programs where journalists and authors are interviewed about their latest books. you can watch every sunday on c-span two or any time our website, book tv.org. >> c-span's washington journal, every day we are taking your calls live on the air on the news of the day. and we will discuss policy issues that impact you. coming up saturday morning,

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